“Let’s be quiet like Indians,” Ben squeals, turning to flash me a gapped-tooth grin from the front seat of our two-man kayak and spinning back around to concentrate on skimming the surface of the water with his double-bladed oars.  I gaze at the back of his colorful hat and the fringe of his smooth corn silk hair beneath the hat’s wide brim. His head is still as he concentrates on paddling.  My heart squeezes.  Time alone with my youngest son is rare and precious. 

Leaving small, silent whirlpools, I carefully slice and pull at the gentle river.  Water drips from my paddle cooling my bare legs, stretched in the boat’s open bow on one of the first truly warm summer days of a cool and wet June.  My skin absorbs the sun like a solar panel, attempting to store its rays for the long season of snow and ice, never too distant in Michigan.

The subtle smell of dry cedar wafts across the river mixing with the mustiness of mud, and hanging in the humid air.  From the shadows of the forest, green spills down the riverbanks.  Ferns, moss and grass crawl atop fallen logs that jut into the sparkling waters. The reflections of puffy white clouds in a blue sky float across the river.

“Look, Mom, a dragonfly! Oh, Mama, a fish!”

“Cool, Ben!”

Like the soaking up of the sun’s rays, I try to absorb the wonder and excitement that is Ben at six years old, knowing how quickly life can change from one season to the next.   

**********

Ben was 1 ½ the humid August day in 2006 when I returned from the grocery store to find his father, my husband, Doug, sitting motionless at the edge of the couch, his long forearms on his knees in tense concentration as he stared at the carpeting. 

“I don’t feel good.”

“What’s wrong?”

I set the grocery bags at the top of the short flight of stairs that led into our split level home and walked past the three squealing boys dashing about the living room.  As I neared the couch, Doug raised his face to me and I felt the flesh melt from my body and pool at my feet, my nerves tingling to attention.

Doug’s skin was the color of cement, a shade that brought to mind words like “ashen” and “pallor”, words that I had read but never seen, a sickly gray that demanded action. 

Nothing had prepared me for this sudden change in Doug’s appearance.  Less than two hours before, I had left for a leisurely trip to the grocery store without my usual posse of two preschoolers and a toddler while Doug took the boys to the hardware store to buy a few things for our on-going home renovations and to indulge our sons in their newest obsession: tools. 

Doug’s patience was a perfect match for the plodding and distracted pace of three young boys, and I could imagine him that morning following the boys from aisle to aisle as they ogled and handled each hammer, screwdriver and wrench, chatting with them about the uses for each tool and sending them into fits of wiggles and squeals at the sight of a chainsaw or power drill until, without warning, a wave of nausea washed over him and a persistent pain settled into his left shoulder. 

Months later, Doug would show me the receipt from that day at the hardware store.

“Why do you keep that?”

“I don’t know.”

Then, careful not to tear or wrinkle the thin slip of paper, he would return it to his battered wallet like a precious souvenir.

**********

Having forgotten about the “quiet-like-Indians game,” Ben now drags his hand through the shallow water, searching the river bottom for a treasure.  I think about Doug’s wallet, the date and time fading like a memory, and I realize that I cannot store this moment with Ben any more than I can archive the sun.  “Just enjoy it,” I think to myself as our kayak follows the predictable curves of the river past cattails and dragonflies.  

Just inches from the tires of my minivan, a tiny white flag sprouts from the grass between the parking lot and the fence.  I nearly miss it as I throw the vehicle into park and open the door simultaneously, hustling my three sons from the van and collecting chairs, coats, blankets, umbrellas and all the other necessary paraphernalia for enduring an hour-long kindergarten soccer match in the cold Michigan rain.  The boys rush ahead of me.  “Make sure you have jackets and water bottles!” I shout to deaf ears and then pause at my trunk, arms full, to watch them trot to the field, three blonde heads bobbing above the hoods of parked cars.  Looking over the field, I can see Lake Michigan at a distance, stretching to the sky with no clear line of horizon to divide its cold waters from the cold mist that now blows in on the throngs of parents and pint-sized soccer players milling about the wide expanse of grass, maintained by our city and divided into four small playing fields.

Taking a few steps toward the field with my head down, suddenly there it is.  The little white flag printed with the stick figures of an adult and child holding hands with a small stick-figure dog at their heels.  A circle with a slash through it obliterates their happy trio and the warning “CAUTION. PESTICIDE APPLICATION.  STAY OFF UNTIL DRY,” clearly states the flag’s purpose.  This tiny emblem that dots my neighborhood and town is an ordinary site; yet my reaction on this day is not ordinary.   My face flushes, and I clench my teeth.  With a sudden surge of furious energy, I feel like the Hulk, capable of tearing the fence from the ground and zinging cars into a pile with a satisfying crunch, my green muscles threatening to break free of my jeans and sweater. 

“Why in the heck do we need to treat a children’s play field with synthetic chemicals?  What for heaven’s sake is wrong with weeds on a soccer field?”

Seething and loaded like a pack mule, I walk to the field, shoes wet from the rain, the hood of my jacket swishing against my ears.  Unwittingly, a fellow soccer mom joins me in my gimpy stride, and bravely listens as I unleash my Hulk rage.  “Did you know they spray this field with chemicals?  I just saw a white flag.  What the heck!  Can’t our kids enjoy an otherwise healthy activity without being exposed to carcinogens!”  My friend accompanies me in stunned silence as I unload my anger and begin to feel my heartbeat slow to the pace of my gait.  “Does she share my indignation?” I wonder.

Most Americans think nothing of spraying their lawns with herbicides and pesticides.   According to McKay Jenkins in “What’s Gotten Into Us: Staying Healthy in a Toxic World,” Americans spend $40 billion a year in lawn care, and estimates of the number of American households using pesticides run as high as 82% (171).   I remember as a new homeowner running my little green hopper of weed-and-feed across my tiny plot of grass, ridding my lawn of weeds.  I felt better knowing my lawn would appear “tidy” and not sully the neighbors’ yards with loose dandelion seeds. 

I had never heard of 2 4-D, developed during World War II to destroy enemy’s crops.  A constituent of the notorious Agent Orange, 2 4-D is the most extensively used herbicide in the history of the world.  It does not require a license to use, and therefore, is present in many “weed and feed” products and has been presented by the lawn care industry as perfectly harmless and safe for civilian use (Jenkins 168-169). 

As I flung weed-and-feed throughout my children’s outdoor play area, I did not know that a growing body of research had linked it to a variety of cancers, that a study in Kansas found that farmers exposed to 2 4-D for twenty or more days a year were six times more likely to develop non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma, that another study by the National Cancer Institute found that dogs were twice as likely to develop lymphoma if their owners used 2, 4-D on their lawns, that in Los Angeles, pediatric cancers were linked to parental exposure to pesticides during pregnancy, and that in Denver, children whose yards were treated with pesticides were four times more likely to have soft-tissue cancers than kids whose yards were not (Jenkins 182).

It wasn’t until 2004 when my son, Drew’s, pediatric urologist claimed that Drew’s birth defect was caused by some unknown environmental exposure during my pregnancy that I began to consider the impact of toxins on my family.  Then, in 2006 when my husband was diagnosed at 33 with an environmental cancer with no known genetic link, I ceased the annual weed-and-feed treatment of my yard.

Now, unfolding my canvas chair in the squishy grass oozing with mud, I watch as my youngest son, Ben throws himself about the field with joyful abandon.  Ben loves to run; he loves to kick, but more than anything Ben loves to throw himself in the grass.  After a hard kick or a fast break, he rolls about on the ground.  From the sidelines, I wonder what other ingredients are added to the soup of grass and mud that smear Ben’s clothes and skin.  Children are particularly vulnerable to environmental toxins because of their small size, their inability to fully detoxify and excrete chemicals from their bodies, the porous nature of their blood-brain barrier and their underdeveloped mechanisms for repairing damage due to toxic exposures (President’s 5).  Scrambling up from the grass, Ben flashes me a wide grin, top tooth missing.  “Did you see me?” his face says.  His golden hair is wet with sweat and rain, mud streaks his full cheeks.  I sigh, knowing I can’t let this issue slide. 


Works Cited

Jenkins, McKay.  (2011). What’s Gotten Into Us? Staying Healthy in a Toxic World.   New York: Random House.

President's Cancer Panel 2008-2009 Annual Report: Reducing Environmental Cancer Risk: What We Can Do Now.   National Cancer Institute.
https://cissecure.nci.nih.gov/ncipubs/detail.aspx?prodid=P227